Blood Ties Page 9

  “It must eat too many bananas.”

  “I don’t think that’s the cause of the yellowing,” I said. “Either way, the thing’s brutal.” I nudged the silver case with my foot. It was sitting right next to me, and didn’t wobble a bit at my effort, due to the weight. “Hopefully the next time I meet it, I won’t even need your help, but still...thank you for coming.”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” a lady said, walking up to me and waving her arms in front of her face. “Lookee who we got here. The Slay Queen!”

  “You forgot to mention me,” Friday said, sounding more than a little offended. “I’m the Slay King.”

  “Dude, no,” I said, shaking my head.

  “This your boyfriend?” the lady asked. She was clearly one of the local homeless, wearing a shirt that looked like it hadn’t been laundered in weeks. She had a layer of dirt and grime on her face and caked in her hair that made her look older than she probably was. Part of me wondered if that was a defense on her part. It couldn’t be easy to be a woman on the streets.

  “He’s my uncle,” I said.

  The lines around her eyes got squinty as she looked up at Friday. “If you’re her uncle, why would you want people to think you’re the Slay King? That’d imply you two were together.” Her accent was not local, at least not originally. It was broader, kind of Midwestern.

  “We are together,” Friday said, just an unmoving slab of stupid.

  “Together together, Friday,” I said, clutching the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. I was very near to facepalming. “Romantically together. Kings and Queens are married.”

  “Not all of them,” Friday said, completely unemotional at this point, in spite of having just verbally maneuvered himself into the oddest, most incestuous place this side of Westeros. “The Queen of England is not married to the King of Sweden.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the Slay Queen,” I said. “If you’re the Slay King—”

  “Fine, fine,” Friday said. “I’ll be the Gangsta Murder King. It’ll fit well with that new gang affiliation I picked up in Oakland.”

  “What gang affiliation?” I asked. “What are you even talking about?”

  “I joined a local gang,” he said. “They wear yellow or red. I think they might be Star Trek-related. I am down with those homies.”

  “I never heard of a gang that wears those colors,” the homeless lady said. “Or takes cues from Star Trek. That’s not real street, if you know what I mean.”

  I directed my attention toward her. “Did you need something?”

  She met my gaze, and I detected a hint of mischief bordering on malice. She was up to something, and if I hadn’t just been accused of incest, odds were good I’d have picked up on it sooner.

  As I was peering at her, I heard the scuff of a shoe next to me and looked down to find someone reaching for my silver suitcase. A dirty hand was already on the handle, grimy wrist disappearing into a dusty, well-worn flannel attached to a homeless dude with several days of beard growth and greasy, lank surfer hair that covered his eyes. He had a good grip on the silver suitcase and turned, ready to run—

  But as his arm reached full extension, grip tight on the handle, he stopped abruptly, jolted off his feet by the shock of finding out that my suitcase weighed several hundred pounds.

  “Yeah, don’t do that,” I said, lightly chopping his elbow to knock his grip loose.

  “Ow!” He withdrew the hand, looking all offended, like I’d just violated his person. “You can’t do that, man! I got rights, you know?”

  “You have the right to be punched in the throat as hard as I can throw one,” I said, “if I catch you trying to steal my shit again. Spoiler warning: my throat punches will crush your larynx, and you’ll die choking on your own blood. So get the hell out of here, will you?” I waved a hand vaguely in his direction, then wheeled on the woman who’d tried distracting me while her partner worked. “You too, Lucy. I have no problem hitting a woman.”

  “You and most the men I’ve known,” she said, and scampered off. I felt a little bad after she said that. She looked like she had probably taken a punch or two in her time, deserved or not.

  “You should have chased them down and crushed them for the insult of trying to steal your stuff,” Friday said, still hulking next to me. He hadn’t moved during the entire exchange, though I thought I’d heard something like a click from him during my exchange with the two ne’er-do-wells. Apparently he was content to let me deal with it. Which was fine. It was pretty low-grade, as these things went, nothing I couldn’t handle. If he adopted the same attitude when we tangled with the Grendel, though, that might be a problem.

  “I don’t think that would have made my bosses happy,” I said, rejoining him in his lean against the wall. “They’re probably looking to avoid any incidents of police brutality that can be ascribed to them and their employees. It looks bad.”

  “World’s gone crazy,” Friday said. “Time was, you wouldn’t put up with this bullcrap. If someone tried to steal from you, you were well within your rights to beat them to death.”

  “What can I say? We’ve had a revolution in sensibilities since then.” I looked sidelong at him. “Besides, you were born in what? The seventies? Eighties? They didn’t kill thieves when you were a kid.”

  “They should have,” Friday said. “It’d be awesome deterrence. Seriously, I miss those days.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You cannot miss what you never saw. Get your rose-colored glasses off.”

  Mendelsohn chose that moment to pop out of the mission. “Uruk’s not here,” he said, adjusting the tweed jacket. It looked itchy to me, but hey, to each their own. “Nobody here’s seen him lately.”

  “Maybe he took one look at Grendel and beat feet out of town,” I said. It’s what I wished I’d done back in Queens, though I didn’t say it.

  “Maybe,” Mendelsohn said, and looked at me. “Inquest?”

  “Inquest,” I agreed. That’d be our next stop.

  “Sweet,” Friday said, coming off the wall. “Yes, we are in a quest. I want a sword. And a dragon. I think I’ll name it ‘Pete.’”

  I couldn’t stop myself from facepalming this time.

  17.

  Friday

  The minute her back was turned dealing with those homeless boobs, Friday had snapped a perfect selfie. He was in the foreground, Sienna was in the background. He quick-typed: “Hanging with my awesome and popular friends because I am awesome and popular. #slayqueen #gangstaking #sanfran #soawesome #blessed #cute #like4like #friends #swag #yolo #artist #fbi #rapstar” Then he hit post and put it away before she finished dealing with those morons.

  “This is really going to up my follower count,” he muttered under his breath. After all, who didn’t want to see the Slay Queen in action?

  18.

  Sienna

  The Inquest headquarters were located in the South Bay area, another section of the ubiquitous sprawl that was San Fran and Silicon Valley. By the time we got there, I didn’t know if we were in Mountain View, San Jose, or San Yo-mama. It was a swanky former suburb and about an hour from downtown San Francisco in traffic.

  Friday, thankfully, followed behind us on his moped. Which was good, because I was concerned about the quality of conversation if he’d been in the limo with me and Mendelsohn.

  Instead, I had a companionable chat with Mendelsohn about the news, in which he regaled me with his (actually fascinating) take on where things were headed. He did this by personalizing it to me via what I’d gone through in my exile.

  “...which is why it was so important that they all be on the same page when it came to ripping you down,” Mendelsohn said. “‘Narrative is everything,’ as my old friend Andrew used to say. If they have anyone deviate from it, anyone who can throw some doubt on what they’re reporting—”

  “The story would have fallen apart,” I said, nodding along as I pushed open the limo door and stepped out into the sunshine. “Because the evidence was out
there, just not clearly visible.”

  “Right,” Mendelsohn said, speaking over the puttering of the moped as it nosed up behind us in a loop leading up to the Inquest HQ.

  “This place looks like Frank Lloyd Wright’s bastard child design-humped the Eiffel Tower into submission,” Friday pronounced as he killed the moped’s engine.

  I looked at the Inquest building and...he wasn’t wrong.

  Where most of Silicon Valley had a very normal-ish corporate office feel, with the exception of maybe Apple’s alien spaceship campus, this place was bizarre. ‘Eclectic’ would have been too kind a word, because it had a metal framework that stretched above most of the office portion, like it was set up to channel otherworldly energy or maybe resurrect Nikola Tesla and fulfill all his aesthetic and experimental ideas in one fell swoop.

  Someone was watching from the main entrance, and stepped out to prop open the door for us. It looked like a twenty-something lady in black pants and a white shirt, as though she’d stepped out of a Men in Black movie. Her hair was purple and spiked.

  “Hello,” she said, waving us forward as Mendelsohn and I took an easy pace across the concrete courtyard toward her. Friday loped behind us a few steps.

  I waved back. “Yes, yes, we see you,” I said, trying to figure out if I could sling my silver suitcase over my shoulder. It didn’t work; it was too long. The end scraped the pavement, producing a noise that made both me and Friday cringe, and me to stop it immediately and go back to carrying it like a guitar case. But so much bigger.

  “I could get that for you if you want.” Friday hulked his way in front of me. “These shoulders are meant to bear serious weight, you know.” He flexed.

  “No, and don’t do that,” I said, waving him off.

  “What, flex my awesomeness?” He leapt ahead and did a pose right out of a bodybuilding competition.

  “This isn’t Venice Beach,” I said, “and that physique is only slightly less natural than any part of Heidi Montag.”

  “Who?” Friday paused mid-flex.

  “Never mind,” I said, steering around him like he was just a piece of statuary. “These are serious people we’re about to meet. Compose yourself accordingly.”

  “I’m totally composed,” Friday said, hopping into place behind Mendelsohn and me like the third point of our triangle. “I’m like Beethoven’s 5th, I’m so composed.” I heard that noise again, and caught Friday with his back to us for a second, messing around with his phone like he’d just taken a picture.

  “You’re like a corpse I dug out of a cemetery a couple months ago, you’re so decomposed,” I said, turning my back on him. If he wanted to take a picture of Inquest’s bizarre HQ as a tourist thing, it was probably the least offensive thing he’d do on this trip. Mendelsohn gave me an alarmed look over my repartee. “It was a cold case thing, not hobbyist grave robbing.”

  “Oh,” he said. I don’t think that quite assuaged his concerns, though.

  “I’m Bron,” the lady holding the door for us said.

  “So am I,” Friday said, flexing again.

  Bron raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m supposed to show you through to the CEOs.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “Please do.”

  Bron held the door open as we moved into the massive lobby. It was a glass structure couched inside the cylindrical wire outer frame. In the middle of the glass lobby stood a giant stone that looked like it had been hauled in from the Grand Canyon, as big as a house. Wings jutted off from the main lobby building to my left and right, giant glass windows letting sun in from all directions, giving the place a feel more like a light, airy convention center or airport rather than a company HQ. “Are you familiar with the CEOs?” Bron asked. “Ever heard their story?”

  “Of course,” Friday said. I didn’t call bullshit aloud, but I did in my head for sure.

  “Yes,” Mendelsohn said. He glanced at me. Him, I believed.

  I sighed. Last woman out. “Yes. Berniece Adams and Hollister McKay, ages 27 and 28 respectively. The operational brains and the programming brawn. Met at Stanford, where Berniece convinced Hollister that his programming ability could be put to more immediate and lucrative use after he came up with a—I forget the technical detail, but basically some unique bit of programming that allowed him to create the Inquest search engine.”

  Mendelsohn gave me a respectful nod, apparently impressed. “Which since, Berniece and Hollister have turned into the world’s foremost search engine, knocking aside all other contenders to the throne in the last few months. Did you read the piece in Business Insider last month?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to cover the very slight flush in my cheeks. “I try to keep up with current events and whatnot.”

  “I don’t,” Friday said. “All news is bad news these days anyway. Like a jolt of depressives right to your bowels.”

  “The CEOs will be very pleased that you’re already aware of them,” Bron said, almost chirping beneath that spiky purple hair. “We’re trying to ride the wave of good press to help cement our newfound position as number one in search worldwide. Our competitors—” she said the word like it was dirty “—are trying to recapture their crown. But really, they’re dinosaurs from a bygone era. Inquest is the future of internet search, and our proprietary algorithm allows us to find what you’re looking for and bring it to you faster.”

  “Like a loyal dog,” Friday said. “Too bad for you I’m a cat person.”

  “There’s been some speculation that you’re using a form of rudimentary AI along with massive data collection to aid your search,” I said, causing Mendelsohn’s eyebrow to crank even farther up, his smile widening. “Is that something the CEOs would be willing to talk about, or nah?”

  Bron stiffened a little as we started to skirt the edge of the massive, house-like rock in the middle of the lobby. “I don’t think they’re willing to discuss proprietary processes, no.”

  “I don’t remember that being in the Business Insider article,” Mendelsohn said pensively.

  “It was in the Forbes piece from three, four months ago,” I said.

  Mendelsohn nodded, once again in respect. “Excellent recall. I remember that one now that you mention it.”

  “Yeah, well, I have a lot of downtime in which to become a font of useless information,” I said. “Plus side—I kill it when I play along with Jeopardy at home.”

  “I would kill at Jeopardy, too,” Friday said. “I’m kind of a genius. Everybody knows it, but nobody likes to talk about it because my super-achievement in the realms of personal fitness, intellect, and my johnson make other, inadequate people feel very uncomfortable. I blame jealousy.”

  I looked back at Friday, still in his uber-large form. “You know, I’ve long speculated that the bigger you get, the dumber you get. Mind shrinking down some so we can have a conversation without you flinging moronic sentences every five seconds like a monkey throwing poo?”

  “Heh, you said ‘poo,’” Friday said, and didn’t shrink. “I can’t shrink now. I need to be fully diesel to be ready for any threat.”

  Bron led us to an elevator at the side of the enormous lobby. Up against the giant rock, I saw three or four information desks. It was tough to tell from the sideways angle. “I’m not sure you’re going to fit in this with all of us,” she said, looking first at the glass elevator shaft, then at Friday. I had to agree, it was going to be an incredibly tight squeeze, if it worked at all.

  “She can just leave that down here,” he said, gesturing to my silver case.

  “Uh, no, she can’t,” I said. “You can either shrink or wait for the next elevator.” It slid down the shaft into place behind us, reminding me of one of those messenger doodads at bank drive-thrus that took your checks and ID and delivered money and receipts. Who built a glass elevator to be perfectly clear? I regarded it with curiosity; if anyone wore a skirt without undies while riding it, the people waiting below would be treated to an illicit glimpse right out of those pervy internet
videos.

  “I’ll wait here and guard your six,” Friday announced, promptly turning his back on me and just standing there, hulking, in front of the elevator door.

  “Great,” I said as Bron led Mendelsohn and me into the elevator. Bron had to do a little creative dodging to make way for my case, but she made it happen. “You just chill here for a while. Let me know if any trouble comes my way.”

  “Oh, I’ll be up on the next elevator,” he said, not bothering to turn around. Instead he announced it to the entire lobby, loud enough for people back in downtown San Fran to hear.

  “Fantastic,” I said. “See ya soon.” The doors slid shut, and he waved over his shoulder through the glass.

  “He’s quite the character,” Mendelsohn said as the elevator slid smoothly into motion.

  “It’s hard to get good help at the government level, y’know,” I said, as Bron tried to stretch over my case, a keycard in her hand, to swipe it at the elevator controls. It made a chiming noise, apparently informing us that we were going somewhere that the base-level peons were not allowed. Yay, so special.

  “He’s not going to be able to get up here without one of these,” Bron said, waving her key card.

  “Perfect; he can wait in the lobby,” I said. “He doesn’t add much to the conversation when he’s this big anyway.”

  The elevator started really moving, traversing about ten floors in the space of ten seconds, then sliding to a stop at the top, where an actual, solid wall had been placed to block the view into the uppermost suites. I could still see out every side of the elevator, but privacy appeared to be a very active concern for whoever inhabited this floor. I considered it a pretty decent statement about the elitism that ran through every strata of society: What is good for the little people is not good for the big ones. But I kept that thought to myself.

  When the door opened, Bron practically tripped over my case to get out first. I wondered if she was afraid to let us wander in this clearly secured area, but I didn’t ask because I’d probably already stepped all over her feelings with my earlier pointed question about Inquest’s search engine success.